“I’ll read it sometime. I have a buddy who loves the Greeks and Romans. It’ll give us something to argue about. But then, everybody loves the Greeks and hates the Romans.”
She smiled. “They love gladiators. Not the robes. They like the swords, but they don’t want to think about the ideas. I think everyone in the publishing business wanted their Roman history to have gladiators a few years ago. That’s the way it goes. Hannibal wasn’t hot enough by himself.”
Henry wished he had a cigarette. But then, Sharon did not smoke, and it would have been impolite in any case.
“And you are positive there is no letter from Tremont Press in a drawer somewhere?”
“No. I told you, Jim threw stuff like that away. He didn’t like negative reminders.”
“Or a name? If you only had a name of anyone else he may have sent the manuscript to …”
“No one I’ve been able to find.… Would you like another beer?”
She had offered him wine, which he had avoided. The only beer she had was a light brand. He had never been fond of what he called nearly beer.
“No thanks.”
“I think I’ll have some more wine.” she said. She moved by him where he sat on the couch so that her leg touched his. She was wearing a beige dress which acquired a flesh tone in the lower light. It rode a little high, he thought, and made the most of her legs.
He asked, “Do you have a copy of the letter from Mr. Boyle?”
She did not answer. She appeared to be thinking about something else as she poured wine at the counter between the living room and the kitchen. When she returned, her leg seemed to pause by his again, and then she sat down. She was closer now than she had been before. Henry realized her counter-assault had begun.
“I need help through this,” she said. Her voice had gone down to just above a whisper. “I need some support … I’ve been through a great deal of strain over the past few years. Even before Jim died, we had problems. Things were not … as we wanted them to be. He was unhappy. I was unhappy. I think it was buying this condo that was the last straw. Keeping up with the payments. Then the rejections. Then his death. It’s been very difficult. Men don’t realize—especially these days, with women’s liberation and everything. Women still need to feel protected. It goes back to the beginning of time. Politics doesn’t change who we are. A woman needs a man to shield her, to take care of her …”
The perfume mixed in the air with the smell of the wine. Her hand was suddenly on his knee. Her lips were less than six inches from his.
The phone rang. In that instant, as it rang the second time, he saw in Sharon’s eyes the anger he had not seen before. The pale blue darkened. Her lips closed tight again. She rose and brushed by him roughly this time and grabbed the receiver from the counter.
It was immediately clear that it was Barbara. It was eight o’clock. She had closed the store for the night and was calling to find out if they could use her help.
Chapter Eleven
Albert was half asleep. He kept repeating that he had been up since five that morning. Henry responded that it was still early—not even midnight yet—he could sleep later.
Albert stopped his truck directly behind Tremont Press, blocking the alley and shadowing the dumpster to the building. The heat had them both sweating into already dampened shirts.
Henry climbed out of the cab alone this time. Albert whined again about the time, but it was drowned in the low grumble of the motor. Albert’s trash pickups for Ready Rubbish Removal began at six in the morning. Henry had not gotten out of bed until noon.
Albert said, “Don’t take all day.”
This was the second week in a row. Their first foray had been a mess. They had removed all the bags from the dumpster and brought them out to the field house of Albert’s athletic club in Dorchester at midnight. Coffee grounds had gotten into the cracks of the floorboards of the basketball court. Half-finished orange juice and diet cola had spread over hundreds of loose sheets of paper, the liquid multiplying in volume as they rummaged for some unknown scrap of information. A never identified oily substance crept mysteriously from beneath the bags.
The athletic club had charged Albert to have a special cleaning crew come by and take care of the smell, which would not go away. Henry had already given Albert the eighty-five dollars to cover that.
But they did learn something. They had learned that Tre-mont Press used grey plastic bags, while the charitable fund used black and the lawyers’ trash bags were white. The Tremont Press garbage bags had contained mostly packing material, along with hundreds of old publishers’ catalogues. They figured the color-coding of the bags was for the janitor, but it made the work the second time around far easier.
Rats scurried from spaces beneath as he opened the top of the dumpster. Henry guessed they were the same ones which had stopped his breath the week before.
Holding a small flashlight in his teeth, he started removing only the grey trash bags, creating a low mound outside the dumpster. He had attributed the fruit juice of the previous week to the charitable fund, and the coffee grounds and the oily substance to the law firm. The fetid air inside the dumpster made him want to gag. Through the metallic drum of his movements against the steel sides of the dumpster, he heard Albert announce the time again.
When Henry opened the gate on the back of the truck to load, a burst of blinding light enveloped him. Albert opened his door with an animal groan from the cab of the truck that startled Henry almost as much as the light. Two policemen left the doors to their car open as they walked up on either side of the truck. Henry kept his mouth shut, having little to say.
“What’s up?” One policeman said to Albert.
Henry squinted against the light and Albert shielded his eyes with one hand and closed his cab door to point at his company name with the other.
“I’m sorry, officer. I’m late. I know. I got a call earlier to pick up overflow garbage from number ninety-seven. The job before this one at a house over in Cambridge took all day. We had to get some dinner. … You know. Now, I know it’s late, but I figured we could just get the crap and get out of here without a peep … You know.”
The closest policeman kicked one of the plastic bags and then looked back at Henry. There was a moment’s hesitation. Looking into the light, the only discernable feature of the cop’s darkened face that offered some clue to his thoughts was the sheen of sweat on one cheek. Then he waved the hand which had rested at his belt.
“Hurry it up. Just don’t do it again. We’ll have some old biddy calling in and complaining about the off-hour noise in no time.”
Henry answered, “Yes, sir,” and started quickly loading the bags into the truck. Albert just nodded wearily, his eyelids returned to half mast, and climbed back in the cab.
Albert did not mind telling the lie. He did that very well. What he minded was telling a lie that could have been found out so easily. If the cop had bothered to open the dumpster and see the bags that Henry had left behind, there would have been more questions and a lot more trouble. Albert grumbled continuously now as they drove back to Cambridge.
“If it wasn’t for the stink he would have looked in that dumpster and known I was shoveling a load of bullshit.”
“The part about the house in Cambridge is partly true.”
Albert shook his head, clearly at a loss as to why that part of the story mattered.
“This is it. If I’m not doing this stuff on the side even when I get paid, I ain’t goin’ to do it anymore when I’m not. I could lose my license doing something like this. It’s not a joke.”
Henry slumped back in his seat, discouraged.
“There’s no book on this. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m no detective. Barbara is asking for too goddamned much.”
Albert grunted something as he changed gears.
Henry asked, “What?”
“You don’t know how to let go any more than she does.” He said it louder the second time.
“Yeah, right. Like I’m the one who will choose to sleep on the couch tonight because I didn’t come home for dinner.”
Henry thought this over a little more seriously. He had refused Barbara’s money. But he was helping her anyway. Why? He pushed the thought away. She was a friend. A friend had asked for help. That was simple.
“She’s a friend …”
Albert grunted.
“What?”
“You have too many friends. Especially female friends.”
Henry thought this over for half a second.
“You’re jealous.”
“Damn right.”
Henry unloaded the plastic bags himself, letting Albert get along home, and brought them up to his apartment two at a time. Mrs. Murray’s lights were off, and he hoped she was asleep. He was not sure how he would explain this.
Moving his box fan from his living room to get the full effect, he began to open the bags one by one on the kitchen floor. He calculated that the sound would less likely reach from there to Mrs. Murray’s bedroom below.
He found something interesting almost immediately. There were notes in the piles of loose paper from George Duggan. From the scribbling on others he quickly identified the handwriting of Nora Lynch. The notes were apparently just between those two. There seemed to be no one else working at Tremont Press. Printers’ quotes and binding problems filled dozens of loose sheets. A handwritten schedule of publication dates projected six titles over the next three months. Several photocopied manuscripts bore the editorial marks of Nora Lynch.
Over two dozen manuscripts, opened, but still in their original manila envelopes, were marked “No return postage.” Dozens of letters from various publishers in New York requested various kinds of information on the two or three authors who had found some audience over the past year. It seemed to be Tremont Press’ policy to release authors to larger publishers if they were willing to pay the price. Henry assumed the letters he found were poor offers which had been rejected.
There was a gentle knock on the door.
The way Mrs. Murray stood in the light of the hall, Henry could see the outline of her body through the shear of her dressing gown. She was wearing nothing underneath.
“You are very busy tonight, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry. It’s a project I have to finish.”
“Trash?” Her eyes darted by him to the scene in the kitchen.
“I’m looking for something that was thrown away. Something important.”
“It looks like you have your work cut out for you. Is it going to take all night?”
“I hope not.”
She hesitated, took a breath. “Can I help? I haven’t been able to sleep with the heat … and all the noise.”
He did not hesitate. If she was not going to object, he was already ahead of the game.
“Sure.”
And he was sorry for his answer as soon as he spoke. She smiled at him now the way she had the other day.
“What are we looking for?”
“Evidence …”
She frowned. His mother used to frown at him like that.
He began again. “Information—about Tremont Press. It’s a small outfit in town. I’m just working off a hunch. … Someone named Nora Lynch works there. She’s the editor, and I guess she is the chief window cleaner and bottle washer too. But the whole thing is financed by George Duggan … You know—” Mrs. Murray nodded as Henry spoke, the frown gone, her lips pursed with consideration of what he was trying to say. It was difficult to keep the story brief. “And he plagiarized … Well, he might have plagiarized a work by a guy named James Frankowski. One thing I’m looking for is anything relating to that—”
“Is it legal for you to have this?” She waved her hand over the piled bags on the kitchen floor.
He did not know how long his hesitation lasted before he got the answer out, but he knew he was feeling like a kid in school again. He was a little old for that.
“I’m not sure … I don’t think it is, but I haven’t got any better ideas.”
She stood at the entrance to the kitchen as he explained again the situation with Sharon and Barbara and her request and the lack of response from the publisher when they had pointed out the coincidence of plot and their fear of lawyers. He had actually told her some of the story one afternoon as she weeded in the yard. She seemed to want to hear it all again.
As he finished, she appeared to hesitate only a brief moment before taking a deep breath.
“So, now, what are we looking for?” she said, the smile returned. He set a second chair at the other side of the mound of bags. Mrs. Murray’s forehead had sprouted tiny beads of sweat, and the moisture had begun to attach parts of her dressing gown like a second skin.
“I don’t know.” He had no real idea.
“Then let’s get at it … You need some organization here, I see.” She pulled the bags he had already opened toward the door. He could not help but notice that her rear-end had not yet begun to sag.
She did not return immediately, but stood in the living room for several minutes.
He leaned out the doorway from his chair. She was looking at the framed photograph of Sasha.
“Have you been seeing Sasha lately?” she finally said.
“Not since the day she came back without her key. She gave the photograph to me because it was taken by her ex-boyfriend. She wanted to throw it away. … I thought it was too beautiful.”
“It is,” Mrs. Murray spoke, as she returned. “Very beautiful.”
They continued to sort through the bags, with Mrs. Murray putting aside anything that might be of interest and re-bagging catalogs, old packing material, and anything obviously useless. Henry tried not to peek up as she leaned forward to remove each handful. Her breasts hung forward then beneath the fabric in a way that made him want to reach out to catch them.
He found it hard to concentrate.
She said, “Here,” and reached out a bare arm, her hand holding a small thin pile of sticky desk notes. He peeled through them. Most were unimportant. One was from George Duggan.
“ ‘Finished the new book this afternoon. I’ll be in Boston next Thursday. See you at the Colonnade at four,’ ” Henry read aloud.
The date at the top of the note was July 10th. The next Thursday was July 17th, tomorrow—today—this afternoon. But Henry had another appointment on the 17th. In the morning, on Louisburg Square. Mrs. Murray spoke before he had finished his thoughts.
“Why don’t you go see him? Talk to him. It can’t hurt. Get a feel for the man and see if he’s really trying to rip somebody off. You know, people like that get accusations of plagiarism all the time. They must have to ignore it or else they’d be constantly fighting battles. They usually have a lawyer—”
Henry was still examining the desk note. At the top of the small sheet was a printed name: Red Hill Camp, Maine. Henry interrupted, looking up.
“Mr. Boyle. Sharon has heard from him. He sent a one-paragraph letter to her which said that any attempt to harass Mr. Duggan would result in legal action with severe penalties, or some such.”
Mrs. Murray stood and straightened her back with her hands on her hips. Henry straightened up in his chair and tried to avoid looking at the outline of her body. He had to change the subject clouding his mind.
“I was thinking of something else … I was thinking of submitting Eddy Perry’s manuscript to them.”
She frowned. It took him another ten minutes then to explain his involvement with Eddy Perry. She sat down again as he finished. Her mood had clearly changed.
“Busy, busy, busy. Do you take any time out to sell your books? How can you afford to pay the rent?”
She was frowning and smiling at the same time. He had seldom seen this done and assumed it was a talent acquired in the classroom as a teacher.
“It’ll be okay. I’ve been lucky just late
ly. But I want to do something about Eddy’s manuscript. And Tremont is really the right publisher for it anyway. They’re small. They’d be able to get it out to the audience that would most appreciate it.”
The smile decreased and the frown dominated.
“Is there no conflict of interest there? Are you thinking he would publish Mr. Perry’s work as a favor after you accused him of plagiarism?”
Henry suddenly felt too tired to attempt an explanation of something he was so unsure of to begin with.
“I didn’t accuse him of anything. I don’t know what’s going on. But both Barbara and Sharon want me to help. I haven’t got any idea what to do. I’m not at all sure that what has happened is any kind of plagiarism. The only people who know are not likely to talk to me about it.”
The smile came back. Henry felt a wave of tension he knew only one meaning for. She tilted her head.
“There are two bags left. Let’s get them done … I need a shower.” Her voice had softened now to something he could not imagine she ever used in a classroom.
She leaned low and pulled the tie loose on a bag as if she were opening her gown, and began sorting.
He ripped open the top of the other bag a bit too fiercely, took a breath, and began to pile up discarded manuscripts.
Mrs. Murray was unfolding crumpled wads of correspondence and laying them neatly flat, one after the other, before putting them aside .… He felt the sweat trickle down the side of his cheek to his chin. There was little of interest in the bag he was working on to keep his mind focused. Suddenly he was aware of her simply looking at him.
“You know, I have a bigger shower downstairs,” she said. “You are welcome to use it.”
A Slepyng Hound to Wake Page 10